Death From Above talk to us about their survival, ‘Outrage! Is Now’ and their name change

'We treated the band as this other thing that we had to respect. Now we don’t - we don’t respect it any more'

Death From Above (fka DFA 1979) have spoken to NME about their survival, new album ‘Outrage! Is Now’ and why they decided to change their name. Watch our video interview with the band above.

Tomorrow sees the band release their third album ‘Outrage! Is Now’ – and it comes after a dramatic change in the attitude of DFA after their 2014 comeback record, ‘The Physical World‘ following their hiatus.

“We’ve realised that Death From Above is just us, plus a couple of pieces of gear,” drummer and vocalist Sebastien Grainger told NME. “It’s not this separate third entity that is mythologised or whatever. We didn’t talk for five years but the band continued to exist and kept working in the background.

“When we started working on [previous record] ‘The Physical World’, we treated the band as this other thing that we had to respect. Now we don’t – we don’t respect it any more!”

Death From Above 1979

Opening up about the evolution of their sound, bassist Jesse F Keeler said: “This record is interesting because I didn’t have any pre-conceived ideas of what the songs would be like. We just wrote what we thought we’d enjoy. One of the things that’s always been important to us is trying to avoid repeating ourselves, musically. I realise that’s probably to the detriment of our careers.”

Grainger added: “When Jesse plays me a demo, sometimes there’s an obvious way to go with it. On this record, I did the complete opposite of that. The best bits are completely incongruous and weird.”

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And as for their reasons for dropping the ‘1979’ from their name, Jesse simply replied: “A couple of years ago we dropped it from our tour posters. No one noticed so we kept doing it.”

Sebastien added: “The final straw was when I was making the art for our single ‘Freeze Me’. I wanted to write the name out in ice, so I went on Amazon and ordered an ice cube tray in the alphabet. It came and there were no numbers. That was that.”

Death From Above release ‘Outrage! Is Now’ on Friday September 8 on Last Gang/eOne. Pre-order it here.